I've read a request for an HTML document from my browser, parsed the file from the request, found the specified file, and now all that's left is to send back the contents of the HTML file to the browser. What I'm currently doing seems like it should work just fine, however, the contents of the HTML file are not received by the browser.

It's hard to tell without knowing what type socketWriter is, but I imagine you'll need to close the connection. Look for a close() method or something similar on socketWriter and call it when you're done.

It is not evident from your code, where socketWriter is going. Low level operations such as socket are best handled by the web server itself. Normally when we have to write a response back to the browser, we make use of HttpServletResponse object which is available in the goGet / doPost method of your servlet. Refer to the javadocs for more details.